Thursday, 18 November 2010

We went away at the weekend up to Newcastle to visit some friends. It was a lovely trip and it was great to see them. Whilst we were up there they took us to Durham Cathedral, Sanctuary21 in Durham and Lindisfarne. All excellent places. The conversation turned to celtic christianity and monasticism and also how The Salvation Army fits into that.

The Salvation Army is, in many ways, an early form of neo-monasticism. It is an "order" of believers who take on a burden above and beyond that required to be a Christian.

A big part of Celtic Christianity, Monasticism and, at least the early, Salvation Army is a daily rhythm. Bizarrely we tend to have a dislike of things like a liturgical calendar or whatever, but many people actually swear by such a rhythm to their life. Having prayers and bible passages that you can recite just like that has it's benefit.

Also, by taking up such a rhythm, there is a visible constant in your life through your ups and downs, a gently reminder of the constant presence of Christ. No matter how your day, your week, your month or even your year (couldn't resist a friends quote there) the prayers are the same, gently building your faith and reminding you that the big picture is much bigger than a single person.

Those of you who have followed my blog for a long time will probably recognise a recurring theme here (hence the title of the post). I keep coming back to this idea, yet always fail to actually put it into practice.

I like the old Salvation Army terms for this practice, they used to call it Knee Drills (for prayer) and Sword Drills (for Bible reading/study). Much as other drills, they sometimes don't appear to have much link to reality - remember the drills performed by Daniel in The Karate Kid? What about the daft things that soldiers do tossing guns around? It's about making certain actions completely second nature. So it should be with prayer and study.

So, I'm once again having a crack at this. I've started reading a Bible in one year plan, although I've decided to start on the correct date than from the beginning. I'm also planning on at least 3 separate prayer times through the day - Morning, Noon and Evening. At the moment I'm not sure what prayers I'll say at what point, as it's important that at least some of those prayers be consistent, so that they can be learnt. I'll need to do some research, but I'll get back to you when I've got a plan.

Pray for me that I stick with it and establish a pattern of prayer and bible reading!

The problem is, we're still using the interface paradigm set out by PARC back in the early seventies. We're still using the basic hardware ideas as set out in the 70s/80s. What happens when you ignore everything that went before and start all over again?

GPUs can perform some calculations considerably faster and better than an x86 processor - people are just starting to get to grips with using them for non-graphic processing. What happens if you build a processor with 4 gpu cores and 4 ARM-based cores, for instance.... what could that machine do?

Could we redesign the bus on a motherboard, could we do it better? What about memory? Could we use mixed memory types to squeeze effectively 32GB of RAM into the space taken by a single stick of 2GB? If we were to speed up the bus and the primary storage, would we still need as much RAM at all?

So, brand new hardware... what about the OS? These days, it needs to be able to fit on everything from a tablet/netbook all the way up to a 24" widescreen monitor. It needs to be built for touch, but still be mouse/keyboard compatible. It needs to be clean, simple and light (on resources). It needs to be able to be simple to use for the average user and for tablets/netbooks, but it needs to be able to knuckle down for high-end stuff (developing, multimedia etc).

The way to go is probably the Linux route - 1 underbelly with a slightly different Desktop Manager for each of the form factors. You have SomeOS Lite for the tablet/netbook/novice user, SomeOS Mobile for the upper-end of the Laptop market and SomeOS Max for the high-end desktop user.

In terms of user experience, you have an App Store - including third party pay-for apps, community developed free apps and OS updates (like an overlap of a mobile app store and the ubuntu package repositories). That way you can fairly quickly have a large collection of applications available for your new OS, despite the fact that nothing ever created before will work without some kind of emulation.

I wish I had the money to put together a team of experts and create something totally brand new. I think we'd give Apple a run for their money...